It's worth noting in this connection that once you get up to the level of mammals, everything is very high compliance, low stiffness, mostly serial joint architecture (no natural Stewart platforms, although you can of course grab something with two hands if need be) typically with significant energy storage in the power train (i.e. springs). This means that the control has to be fully Newtonian, something most commercial robotics haven't gotten up to yet.
I think that state of the art is just now getting to dynamically-stable-only biped walkers. I've seen a couple of articles in the past year, but it certainly isn't widespread, and it remains to be seen how real. Josh On Sunday 10 February 2008 04:35:13 pm, Bob Mottram wrote: > The idea that robotics is only about software is fiction. Good > automation involves cooperation between software, electrical and > mechanical engineers. In some cases problems are much better solved > electromechanically than by software. For example, no matter how > smart the software controlling it, a two fingered gripper will only be > able to deal with a limited sub-set of manipulation tasks. Likewise a > great deal of computation can be avoided by introducing variable > compliance, and making clever use of materials to juggle energy around > the system (biological creatures use these tricks all the time). ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=94603346-a08d2f
